Robin Lowe has consistently pursued several bodies of work over the course of his vibrant career as an artist, including psychological portraits, equally charged road paintings, representations of mundane objects saturated in nostalgia, and stream of consciousness drawings that crack open a window to madness. He was once described as an enigmatic painter with a smarting honesty both in person and on the canvass. “Well, that’s the way I like it,” he replied, “images come to me as if out of nowhere, and I feel a compulsion to deal with them. It’s the process of bringing the subconscious into some sort of tangible reality.”
His obsession with roads was born out of many years as a truck driver. “I have taken thousands of photos while driving, at all times of day and night, with the intent to use them as reference material. Roads are sexy and seductive and really massage the mind into telling the truth. The Road is a symbol of that journey and the fact that for better or worse, none of us really knows where we are going.”
In this exhibition, we viewers are psychic hitchhikers, dropped off on expertly realized yet dreamlike roadways, left to find a way to cope with gorgeous isolation. There’s an obvious direction in front of us but no beginning or end; there’s a horizon but only the promise of another, perhaps identical horizon farther on. The point is not movement, quite the opposite—we’re captured in one place, a road’s broad back dominating our first impressions like a wall, tricking perspective—but the evidence of movement is compelling, the view, we come to realize, unrestricted. We see beauty, exquisite detail in the layered landscapes, enlivened textures, and the brushed wake of ghost cars in macadam rivers. But any obvious purpose has been removed. The titles are playful. The distractions of human habitation are gone. Lowe’s road compositions elicit an existential apprehension, but our viewpoint, magically floating, liberates the imagination.
Text by Marc Grigorov
Installation shot of Camino del Volcán, 2024, Oil on linen, 100 x 90 in.